Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal, who stepped down from the company's board last week after seventeen years, will remain on the board of PhonePe, a payments company incubated by the e-commerce giant.
“There is no conflict and he is one of the earliest backers (of PhonePe),” a person familiar with the matter told Moneycontrol. The development comes at a time when Bansal is starting up again, in the e-commerce space with OppDoor.
Binny’s decision to step down from the e-commerce giant's board comes months after he sold his remaining stake in the firm. His other co-founder Sachin Bansal exited Flipkart a few years ago and is now building a fintech venture, Navi.
Bansal did not respond to messages and PhonePe did not comment on the development.
PhonePe is a dominant online payment app in India and competes directly with GPay, Paytm, and Amazon Pay, among others in the UPI network. Interestingly, Flipkart is also piloting its own UPI payments and has larger fintech ambitions.
Binny Bansal and Phonepe
Both Flipkart and PhonePe are majority-owned by the US-based retail giant Walmart. Initially a subsidiary of Flipkart, PhonePe was spun off as a separate company in 2020. Soon after the spin-off talks began, Bansal decided to join PhonePe’s board of directors.
Moneycontrol was the first to report on Bansal’s e-commerce ambitions in August. The new company will offer design, product, human resources, and other backend support to e-commerce companies looking to expand to different regions by leveraging the networks of top platforms like Amazon and others.
Meanwhile, in April of 2023, PhonePe launched Pincode, a new consumer-facing application, part of India's Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) framework to strengthen its e-commerce forays. This was exactly three months after Flipkart completed the full ownership separation of the payments startup.
Interestingly, Bansal does not see any conflict of interest with PhonePe.
To be sure, Binny Bansal was among the early backers of the fintech giant during his tenure as the CEO of Flipkart. Recently, PhonePe raised nearly $450 million in primary capital from private equity (PE) major General Atlantic, Tiger Global, Ribbit Capital, and others, valuing the company at $12 billion.
Walmart continues to be the largest investor in PhonePe with around 70 percent stake.
In fact, in March 2023 Bansal was in talks to invest about $100-150 million in PhonePe as part of an ongoing financing round at the digital payments company.
Some of Flipkart's existing shareholders, such as Bansal, Tiger Global, China’s Tencent, Qatar Investment Authority and Microsoft, were expected to buy a fresh stake in PhonePe, as the company put together a new ownership structure, according to the Business Daily.
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